forest city film festival.
From July 2017 until the end of the same year, I helped lead the marketing strategy for Forest City Film Festival’s second year. Forest City is the only film festival in one of Canada’s largest cities, London and the biggest festival celebrating talent from Southwestern Ontario. This role entailed managing the festival’s digital assets, working on print material, and event coordination. Here’s the breakdown.
Problem
As a young festival, the brand’s image had not developed fully. Moreover, a previous lack of online presence risked stagnating festival growth in a digitally run marketing space. The bottomline? Ticket sales had to increase in order to help the festival grow the following year and be able to facilitate a larger audience.
Strategy
I worked on creating various solutions with the festival director and the rest of the festival team. Amongst the strategies I proposed and executed included:
daily instagram posts to highlight what was to come in the festival
films stills with lighthearted and fun summaries, sponsored posts, highly engaging during the festival weekend
fun + interesting instagram stories to increase engagement and serve as a reminder to those not seeing posts due to algorithmic issues that would not favour a new/inactive account
Utilize Twitter for international presence only as the local demographic was found not to be largely active on twitter
more posts relating to London’s role in very large blockbuster Hollywood films
Directing all socials to Facebook on the daily
Using Facebook as an interactive space as it consistently outperformed all other social streams
Live Q+A periods with filmmakers whose films would be coming to FCFF
pre-filmed interviews with guests
articles and posts summarizing the most noteworthy films coming to the festival
posting about FCFF community engagements (appearances at Comic Con, etc).
Live streaming all Q+A’s from the actual festival during festival weekend
Targeted ads in local print publications
spanish advertisement for spanish films at the festival for London’s spanish newspaper
Radio appearances and talking about films to come that would be of likely interest to the station’s audience
Autograph signings with actors appearing in films part of the Kids Films category (Callan Potter & Jonny Gray of Bruno & Boots)
Overall, the strategy was to change the voice of the festival. Taking it from one that was fairly traditional and spread about by word of mouth and sponsors, to one that was both friendly, large, established, approachable, yet still very much about the London community.
Result
Ticket sales increased drastically and social engagement increased by about 400% across all platforms. It also became the first year that received attention from news outlets and arts publications.
